Steve Harpur
Brummie babby
Bilberry Hill : Hello, I drove past there today (Thursday 5 aug. 21) and can confirm that all the windows and doors, are now boarded up with metal sheeting. Cheers......Steve
Lyn, I am just rereading this thread. And to your point (at least with me) you never know where life takes you. I always want to be an engineer around tools, which lead to manufacturing to factory automation and then to managing a car body plant making bodies for BMW, Mercedes, Honda & Toyota, all premium vehicles. Then to an engine company right out of the blue into global operations. There are so many twists and turns that life gives us, you never really know until you get there!i have found the last few posts very interesting to read but one thing does strike me and that is just how we all in some shape or other helped to keep the world turning...no one person is any better or worse than the next in terms of what jobs we do/did ..everyone plays a part in keeping the wheels of industry/economy turning and obviously some professions take longer than others to perfect..imagine if we all chose the same profession what a pickle we would be in...i have always admired people like eric who went into the motor trade who could no doubt strip down an engine blindfolded and put it back together again and here is me who cant even change a plug lol..one thing is for certain though and that is we all need each other
lyn
Got the headache!If you'd like to give yourself a headache about what was going on at that time take a read of Hansard.
https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1949/jul/05/education
its true isnt it mike the young one today wouldnt get 6 interviews never mind being offered 5 out of the 6...i wished i had thanked mom and dad while they were still with me but i guess its only when we ourselves grow older and wiser that we think about these things..i have no doubt my own 4 children will think the same when they are my age...its just the way it isI agree about not realising the sacrifices till later, though I am sure your parents felt they were rewarded by how well you did.
Lyn - I too had a large choie of jobs. If only present youngsters had the same choice
I think that only applied if there were no other schools with the 3 mile zone, something that my parents didn't work out until I had been offered a place. The generosity of the City was really that of the rate and taxpayers!As the school I attended was over 3 miles from home Birmingham authority paid for the bus fare, thankfully. The city was very generous.
Absolutely my mom gave me bus money every day…..I always walked home and saved the money. When I was older I went on my bike but nothing from the city. We had no car, dad almost never worked and new clothes were a rarity until I got a part time job after school at 14.I think that only applied if there were no other schools with the 3 mile zone, something that my parents didn't work out until I had been offered a place. The generosity of the City was really that of the rate and taxpayers!
John, not only the distance between but the number of people. In another thread on workhouses there were some statistics from the 18 century, unfortunately this is not new. ( I-won’t say any more).Perhaps things were a little easier for my family, in that there were only we twins, and both parents worked. There was always a car in the drive, even if some of the cars had been in quite a few other drives before Dad bought them! Because of my brother’s disability we made regular trips to London specialists which must have been a drain on the family resources and spent many hours in the Birmingham Children’s Hospital too, those murals in the big waiting room held my interest only for so long…
In terms of bus fares, Staffs County seem to have applied the same rules as Birmingham, our village being more than three miles from school, bus passes for the Midland Red were issued until I left the sixth form. These did not seem to be income related as one of the group had very exalted parents. Like previous correspondents, I am sure that I did not really understand or appreciate the efforts of my parents in raising my brother and me to manhood free from day to day worries about life.
Of more concern now seems to be that the distance between the barely scraping through and the comfortably off seems now to be wider than ever, and widening.
A lot of this is close to home. Mom was a single mom and goodness knows how she kitted me out for grammar school. My wife tells me that mom once shared with her that she had had some help from her father. Mom was an only child and her dad had been widowed at about sixty. So maybe this was true.I have the impression that all of the working class children who went to Grammar schools had parents who struggled to pay for our uniforms.
Its amazing how our parents did it. Looking a this and Jim's note above. There was a will and they found a way!The City of Birmingham Education Committee rules for assisted travel in 1960 plus starting papers from Saltley Grammar School. Probably cost over £11 for school uniform at a time when a bus conductor got about £13 per week
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